The troubadour makes a low obeisance before the throne. Dom Pedro nods encouragement, Maria de Padilla smiles graciously, only Doña Blanca's pallid face remains immobile. The hoary bard begins his song:[41]
"My noble king and mighty lord,
A discourse hear most true;
'Tis Santob brings your Grace the word,
Of Carrion's town the Jew.
In plainest verse my thought I tell,
With gloss and moral free,
Drawn from Philosophy's pure well,
As onward you may see."[42]
A murmur of approval runs through the crowd; grandees and hidalgos press closer to listen. In well-turned verse, fraught with worldly-wise lessons, and indifferent whether his hortations meet with praise or with censure, the poet continues to pour out words of counsel and moral teachings, alike for king, nobles, and people.
Who is this Rabbi Don Santob? We know very little about him, yet, with the help of "bright-eyed fancy," enough to paint his picture. The real name of this Jew from Carrion de los Condes, a city of northern Spain, who lived under Alfonso XI and Peter the Cruel, was, of course, not Santob, but Shem-Tob. Under Alfonso the intellectual life of Spain developed to a considerable degree, and in Spain, as almost everywhere, we find Jews in sympathy with the first intellectual strivings of the nation. They have a share in the development of all Romance languages and literatures. Ibn Alfange, a Moorish Jew, after his conversion a high official, wrote the first "Chronicle of the Cid," the oldest source of the oft-repeated biography, thus furnishing material to subsequent Spanish poets and historians. Valentin Barruchius (Baruch), of Toledo, composed, probably in the twelfth century, in pure, choice Latin, the romance Comte Lyonnais, Palanus, which spread all over Europe, affording modern poets subject-matter for great tragedies, and forming the groundwork for one of the classics of Spanish literature. A little later, Petrus Alphonsus (Moses Sephardi) wrote his Disciplina Clericalis, the first collection of tales in the Oriental manner, the model of all future collections of the kind.
Three of the most important works of Spanish literature, then, are products of Jewish authorship. This fact prepares the student to find a Jew among the Castilian troubadours of the fourteenth century, the period of greatest literary activity. The Jewish spirit was by no means antagonistic to the poetry of the Provençal troubadours. In his didactic poem, Chotham Tochnith ("The Seal of Perfection," together with "The Flaming Sword"), Abraham Bedersi, that is, of Béziers (1305), challenges his co-religionists to a poetic combat. He details the rules of the tournament, and it is evident that he is well acquainted with all the minutiæ of the jeu parti and the tenso (song of dispute) of the Provençal singers, and would willingly imitate their sirventes (moral and political song). His plaint over the decadence of poetry among the Jews is characteristic: "Where now are the marvels of Hebrew poetry? Mayhap thou'lt find them in the Provençal or Romance. Aye, in Folquet's verses is manna, and from the lips of Cardinal is wafted the perfume of crocus and nard"—Folquet de Lunel and Peire Cardinal being the last great representatives of Provençal troubadour poetry. Later on, neo-Hebraic poets again show acquaintance with the regulations governing song-combats and courts of love. Pious Bible exegetes, like Samuel ben Meïr, do not disdain to speak of the partimens of the troubadours, "in which lovers talk to each other, and by turns take up the discourse." One of his school, a Tossafist, goes so far as to press into service the day's fashion in explaining the meaning of a verse in the "Song of Songs": "To this day lovers treasure their mistress' locks as love-tokens." It seems, too, that Provençal romances were heard, and their great poets welcomed, in the houses of Jews, who did not scruple occasionally to use their melodies in the synagogue service.
National customs, then, took root in Israel; but that Jewish elements should have become incorporated into Spanish literature is more remarkable, may, indeed, be called marvellous. Yet, from one point of view, it is not astonishing. The whole of mediæval Spanish literature is nothing more than the handmaiden of Christianity. Spanish poetry is completely dominated by Catholicism; it is in reality only an expression of reverence for Christian institutions. An extreme naturally induces a counter-current; so here, by the side of rigid orthodoxy, we meet with latitudinarianism and secular delight in the good things of life. For instance, that jolly rogue, the archpriest of Hita, by way of relaxation from the tenseness of church discipline, takes to composing dansas and baladas for the rich Jewish bankers of his town. He and his contemporaries have much to say about Jewish generosity—unfortunately, much, too, about Jewish wealth and pomp. Jewish women, a Jewish chronicler relates, are tricked out with finery, as "sumptuously as the pope's mules." It goes without saying that, along with these accounts, we have frequent wailing about defection from the faith and neglect of the Law. Old Akiba is right: "History repeats itself!" ("Es ist alles schon einmal da gewesen!").
Such were the times of Santob de Carrion. Our first information about him comes from the Marquis de Santillana, one of the early patrons and leaders of Spanish literature. He says, "In my grandfather's time there was a Jew, Rabbi Santob, who wrote many excellent things, among them Proverbios Morales (Moral Proverbs), truly commendable in spirit. A great troubadour, he ranks among the most celebrated poets of Spain." Despite this high praise, the marquis feels constrained to apologize for having quoted a passage from Santob's work. His praise is endorsed by the critics. It is commonly conceded that his Consejos y Documentos al Rey Dom Pedro ("Counsel and Instruction to King Dom Pedro"), consisting of six hundred and twenty-eight romances, deserves a place among the best creations of Castilian poetry, which, in form and substance, owes not a little to Rabbi Santob. A valuable manuscript at the Escurial in Madrid contains his Consejos and two other works, La Doctrina Christiana and Dansa General. A careless copyist called the whole collection "Rabbi Santob's Book," so giving rise to the mistake of Spanish critics, who believe that Rabbi Santob, indisputably the author of Consejos, became a convert to Christianity, and wrote, after his conversion, the didactic poem on doctrinal Christianity, and perhaps also the first "Dance of Death."[43] It was reserved for the acuteness of German criticism to expose the error of this hypothesis. Of the three works, only Consejos belongs to Rabbi Santob, the others were accidentally bound with it. In passing, the interesting circumstance may be noted that in the first "Dance of Death" a bearded rabbi (Rabbi barbudo) dances toward the universal goal between a priest and an usurer. Santob de Carrion remained a Jew. His consejos, written when he was advanced in age, are pervaded by loyalty to his king, but no less to his faith, which he openly professed at the royal court, and whose spiritual treasures he adroitly turned to poetic uses.
Santob, it is interesting to observe, was not a writer of erotic poetry. He composed poems on moral subjects only, social satires and denunciations of vice. Such are the consejos. It is in his capacity as a preacher of morality that Santob is to be classed among troubadours. First he addressed himself, with becoming deference, to the king, leading him to consider God's omnipotence:
"As great, 'twixt heav'n and earth the space—
That ether pure and blue—
So great is God's forgiving grace
Your sins to lift from you.
And with His vast and wondrous might
He does His deeds of power;
But yours are puny in His sight,
For strength is not man's dower."
At that time it required more than ordinary courage to address a king in this fashion; but Santob was old and poor, and having nothing to lose, could risk losing everything. A democratic strain runs through his verses; he delights in aiming his satires at the rich, the high-born, and the powerful, and takes pride in his poverty and his fame as a poet: